Some idiot at my work place wanted to remove the drives from about 20 old G4 powerbooks, but could not find a small enough torx key. He ended up using a big screw driver to twist the cases open and removed the drives.

Now I have this huge pile of old powerbooks which will probably be thrown in the trash.

My first idea is to try to see if I could build a "vcr" out of them. I have an extra eye-tv license and a tv-stick.

I don't have any special modding experience, though I've built countless pc's and gone as far as soldering CPU's to enable features I need. However for something like a case mod I don't know if I would have the patience, tools or skills. So basically I'd need to figure out a very simple and easy way to get the box together.

First of all, welcome to MacMod. What a great dilemma you have. I would take the parts and salvage what I could and build a local home server, maybe an HTPC, maybe sell some of the logic boards, etc. There are tons of things you can do with them! Don't throw them away! There are lots of folks here that would love to have some of that hardware.

I am personally stunned into silence at such a wanton act of ignorant barbarism...

Breath, man, breath...

The Eyetv idea is a good one, the powerbook is excellent for that due to its relative silent operation and low power requirements, just be sure the Eyetv device you have has a hardware encoder or you may be disappointed in the powerbook's performance in the roll of a brute force video cruncher.

Thanks for the reply's. The cases are mainly broken so that the panel around the keyboard has been twisted up. Hence the bottom of the case could still be usable (maybe even the top could be twisted back).

The biggest question in my mind is how to do the case. I'm not very much of a modder so building a case out of plastic etc is probably out of my league. I was thinking I could take some box and just glue the bottom part of the powerbook into it so that the superdrive aligns with some hole in the case, but that would not be very pretty.. I'm guessing the motherboard won't adhere to any *ATX specifications allowing me to use some box purchasable from the shop?

edit: just to give you a better picture (sorry about the image quality)...

I "Redneck Fix" those all the time, when your car gets a dent, just bang it out. I would try flattening the top on a few, if you have a bunch some will most likely come out fine. remove the top case completely (and properly, no screwdrivers this time, lol) and gently bend it flat on a nice hard, level surface. I will prob work.

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